Well, I think there are very good reasons for staff to be publicly visible as staff. For one, having them operate on anonymous alternate accounts would kill the effectiveness of the scholars completely, who are meant to be obviously apparent as people one should go to with questions and such. I'm assuming this is all more addressed at the mods anyway, so I'll put this out as a counter consideration: would you rather the possibility of some people liking their colored usernames a little too much and therefore joining staff for the wrong reasons and abusing their power in very obvious ways, or people misusing undemarcated alternate accounts and operating like a secret police? I'm almost certain the latter would have worse results, both in the worst-case scenario and in general.

I would be interested in seeing the sources for some of these claims. Also, I think it’s pretty optimistic to be of the opinion that getting services paid by “private groups” would solve anything. Who are these groups? What incentive would they have to pay for the things currently regulated by the government?

Well for one, taxes feed into things like infrastructure and the social safety net, which because of the way the government works, is in a lot of cases what's keeping poor people alive. For two, lower taxes on corporations doesn't affect all that much what the average employee makes—it affects the profit margin and how much the executives are getting. This does have some effect on the economy, but the argument from this point of view, which seems to bear out historically, is that the economy on the whole does better when regulated to a certain degree than when corporations are allowed maximally free rein.

What about naming the AI Verdandi? After one of the Norse goddesses of fate. Verdandi was supposed to represent the present moment, and the AI is presumably always "present" to be consulted/do doorman things. :information_desk_person::skin-tone-2:

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Maki is a labor of love, a result of several years of iterations and re-architectures in pursuit of a clean, hand-rolled framework for building beautiful applications. We hope you like it.

Copyleft

Maki is copyleft, and encourages you to copy, clone, and create. After all, without a rich public domain, how else can we innovate? Much to our chagrin, the software itself is more formally MIT licensed, while our content is licensed under CC-BY.